Monday, June 3, 2013

It is very easy to check local network speed
in Windows but if you have putty access to Linux machine then we are facing
issues to check the network speed. There are some tools are available to check
network speed iin Linux but it is not possible to install this tools on client machine or
our secured machine.

Network speed in linux is depend on the Ethernet
card or network interface card which you are using for this machine. Might be
there are multiple Ethernet cards already configured, we can check network
speed for each separately.

Generally, Ethernet cards are configured.
If we see the the output of below command then we will get all NICs.

root@hello:~# ifconfig -a

eth0 Link encap:EthernetHWaddr 1c:6f:65:0b:00:eb

inet
addr:10.136.25.42
Bcast:10.136.25.255
Mask:255.255.255.0

inet6 addr:
fe80::1e6f:65ff:fe0b:eb/64 Scope:Link

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500
Metric:1

RX packets:1133376 errors:0
dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:34516 errors:0 dropped:0
overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

RX bytes:11234117 (113.8 MB) TX bytes:9056744 (9.0 MB)

Interrupt:16
Memory:fc500000-fc520000

lo Link
encap:Local Loopback

inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.255.0.0

inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host

UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436
Metric:1

RX packets:20442 errors:0 dropped:0
overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:20442 errors:0 dropped:0
overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:0

RX bytes:2356951 (2.3 MB) TX bytes:2356951 (2.3 MB)

root@hello:~#

If we see in above output, there are two
cards configured. But eth0 is the main. So we need to check network speed for
it only.

Above command will be helpful to check system
is half duplex or full duplex. Dmesg command gives lots of information but it
is not that much of useful for us just grep needed information.

We can
check network speed of wireless card and chipset information.

root@hello:~#lspci | grep -i wireless

To test
internet connection speed from the console over ssh command line, we need to
install lftp and iperf packages. They are easily available. We can download rpm
of them or install it from yum repository.

After installation, download or upload data by lftp, pget
command or check network speed between two IPs by iperf command.